Zheliu Zhelev

Zheliu Zhelev (born March 3, 1935, Veselinovo, Bulgaria—died January 30, 2015, Sofia) was a Bulgarian dissident and politician who served as president of Bulgaria from 1990 to 1997.

Zhelev graduated with a degree in philosophy from St. Clement of Ohrid University of Sofia (1958). In 1965 he was expelled from the university and the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) after he refused to alter his dissertation to remove its criticism of Leninism. He was subsequently (1966) banished from Sofia, spending the next six years unemployed. He finally obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy with a new dissertation in 1974, when he was appointed a researcher for the Bulgarian State Institute of Culture, an office of the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry that engaged in cultural diplomacy. He later (1977–82) served as head of the institute’s culture and personality department. He was awarded a Doctor of Science degree in philosophy in 1988.

From the early 1980s Zhelev was a prominent figure within Bulgaria’s small dissident movement. His scholarly book Fascism (written in 1967) was removed from bookstores and banned only three weeks after its publication in 1982 when authorities realized that its critique of fascist regimes applied equally to the communist governments of eastern Europe (the book’s original title was The Totalitarian State). Clandestinely circulated, it reached a wide audience in the country.

After working as an environmental activist in the industrial city of Ruse, Zhelev became founding member and chair of the country’s first dissident organization, the Club for Support of Glasnost and Perestroika (1989). Following the forced resignation of the country’s longtime leader, Todor Zhivkov, in November 1989, Zhelev was elected the first chair of the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF), a loose association of dissident groups and revived prewar political parties dedicated to bringing about democratic reform in Bulgaria. In June he won a seat in a Grand National Assembly to draft a new constitution, and in August the Assembly elected him head of state (president) of Bulgaria. In parliamentary and presidential elections held under the new constitution in October 1991 and January 1992, respectively, the UDF’s new leader, Philip Dimitrov, became prime minister and Zhelev became president for a five-year term. His influence as president was limited, however, by dissension within the UDF and by the election in 1994 of a government led by the Bulgarian Socialist Party, as the former BCP now called itself.

In 1996 he was defeated in UDF primary elections by Petar Stoyanov, who became Bulgaria’s next president in 1997. Zhelev later founded the Dr. Zheliu Zhelev Foundation (1997) and the Balkan Political Club (2001), an organization of intellectuals and current and former political leaders in southeastern Europe.